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ISS Solar Transit

June 10 2003

On June 10 2003 I was able to capture the International Space Station transiting the Sun. Thanks to the email alert service by Tom Fly I received the exact location of the transit which was only a few kilometers from my home observatory. Rechecking that position with CalSKY.com confirmed the position and good weather that day allowed me to capture the transit. Using my Zeiss C 80/500 refractor and a ToUcam Pro webcam I recorded the video with 10 fps. The velocity of the station is quit impressive. Just a split second and the station passed the Sun. The animation shows the correct velocity of the ISS as it was captured on the video. The picture of the sun is a mosaic made from 3 parts overlayed with the frames showing the ISS which where processed separately to bring out more contrast and detail of the station.

Special thanks to my colleagues Ralf Backhaus who was able to recover a broken AVI file and to Arne Bayer who lent me his notebook !

klick here to see the full-size version (~1mb)